February 21st

This week, Critical Distance passed the auspicious milestone of one hundred thousand pageviews. So to that one person refreshing the page constantly for a week straight – thank you.

And now, onto more serious matters, and Eric Swain has continued his tireless efforts of scouring the videogame blogosphere for our collective benefit. In a yin-yang pairing, The Game Overthinker proudly proclaims “I heart Bayonetta”, while Gunthera1 writes at The Borderhouse after having played the demo of the game with some friends and concludes that “the game is the perfect visual example of male gaze”.

Jim Rossignol had a remarkably busy week, announcing his follow-up book to 2008’s This Gaming Life. I for one can’t wait for the as-yet untitled work. Rossignol also talked about online communities, the site Rock Paper Shotgun as a community, and a bit about how the infamous Sunday Papers regular feature ties into and reinforces the community.

Kirk Hamilton finds out what it would be like “If my games could talk” with important implications for any backlog of games.

With Bioshock 2 and other sequels having now had time to arrive and settle, sequels in general became a hot topic this week with both Mitch Krpata and Michael Abbott talking about the proclivity of the industry towards game sequels. Krpata’s piece, ‘Why we need sequels’, appeared just hours before Michael Abbott’s ‘Sequel 101’ so you’d be forgiven for thinking they were working from the same playbook. As always, great minds think alike.

Chris Livingston wrote about Stalker: Call of Pripyat this week, recounting an exciting dynamic and emergent story. I actually had a very similar experience at a similar point in the game, having been playing it this week myself (and it is glorious).